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Scots may not like uncoupling as much as Paltrow

If you’re still wondering what conscious uncoupling looks like, forget Gwyneth Paltrow, just take a look at the Scottish economy. Amid a week of stock market turmoil, and in which official figures confirmed the UK’s trade deficit rose in the final quarter of 2015, the Scottish government managed to produce even worse news.

The national accounts revealed a further widening in Scotland’s trade gap with the rest of the UK, and that Scottish GDP per head, the SNP’s preferred measure of prosperity, is below the rest of the country.

Most of the headlines last week focused on the plunge in Scotland’s share of North Sea revenues for the first six months of this financial year, hitting a 40-year low.

This was hardly surprising given that the Scottish government had projected between £6.8bn and £7.9bn in oil revenues during the first year of an independent Scotland, as opposed to the £55m